Big Bird, Meet Dick and Jane

I have watched Sesame Street, perhaps a dozen
or more times, off and on since it began, most
recently a number of times in succession. I love
Ernie, Bert, the monsters, and indeed all the puppets. The animated cartoons are done with great
style, verve, and wit. The music is very good; some
of the tunes, like the theme, or the one for counting
from 1 to 10, really stick in the mind. Most of all, I
enjoy the humor of the program—dry, deadpan,
ironic.

The show is much better than most of what has
been offered to children on TV, and it seems to be
an unqualified success. Children watch it, like it,
and according to tests, are learning much of what it
is trying to teach. Nonetheless, and in spite of all its
successes, I feel very strongly that Sesame Street has
aimed too low, has misunderstood the problem it is
trying to cure, and will be a disappointment in the
long run. I also feel that it has misunderstood the
nature and underestimated the opportunities of its
chief subject, the three R’s, and its medium, television; and therefore, that even what it sets out to do
in the short run it does not do nearly as well as it
might.

The operating assumption of the program is probably something like this: poor kids do badly in
school because they have a “learning deficit."
Schools, and school people, all assume that when
kids come to the first grade they will know certain
things, be used to thinking and talking in a certain
way, and be able to respond to certain kinds ul
questions and demands. Rich kids on the whole
know all this; poor kids on the whole do not. Therefore, if we can just make sure that the poor kids
know what the rich kids know by the time they get
to school, they will do just as well there as the rich
kids. So goes the argument. I don’t believe it. Poor
kids and rich kids are more alike when they come to
school than is commonly believed, and the difference is not the main reason poor kids do badly when
they get there. In most ways, schools are rigged
against the poor; curing “learning deficits,” by Head
Start, Sesame Street , or any other means, is not going to change that.

The program asks, “How can we get children
ready to learn what the schools are going to teach
them?", instead of “How can we help them learn
what the schools may never teach them?” This is the
first of its lost, or not yet seen, opportunities—to be
very different from school. Instead, it is like a conventional
school run by supergifted teachers. It is
full of little invisible lesson plans, complete with behavioral objectives and motivating devices. It assumes, like most schools, that nobody ever learns
anything by himself, naturally, incidentally, as a byproduct of doing or attending to something important to him; that on the contrary, everything, however trivial, must be deliberately taught, and will be
thought best if it is taught all by itself, cut off from
all connections with the rest of life. Sesame Street schedules a couple of minutes to “teach” the difference between the words “more” and “less,” or between the words “think,” “hope,” “imagine"; to
teach that the corners of a square are all alike, that
the numeral 7 has the name “seven,” that people
don’t change just because they put on different
clothes, or whatever it may be. The continuum of,
life, or experience, is everywhere destroyed; the separate bits of one Sesame Street program can be interchanged with the separate bits of any other.

Learning on Sesame Street, as in school, means
learning Right Answers, and as in school,
Right Answers come from grown-ups. We
see children figuring things out. As in school,
we hear children responding, without much animation
or imagination, to leading questions put by adults. But we rarely see them figuring things out; in fact,
we rarely see children doing anything. On two recent
programs, children did a dance shown them by a
grown-up, followed grown-ups in bringing cardboard
hoxes so that Big Bird could make a tower of eleven
of them, played a dull same-difference game with
shoes, and sat mute while the grocery-store keeper
asked them a question that none of them could answer. In one episode, two children played a game with
a jigsaw puzzle as big as they were. But most of
the time when we see children on the program, they
are standing around, often looking uneasy, while an
adult shows or tells them things, or asks school-style
questions to which he obviously already has the answer

In spite of its visual medium, Sesame Street is still
strangely aural. To be sure, there are plenty of images,
film clips, animated cartoons, dramatized stuff with
the Muppets, and so on, and some of the time the
pictures do carry the meaning. On one recent show,
there was a film clip of young animals and children
learning new and difficult skills, with a sound track
of children’s voices shouting encouragement. On another, there was a good clip about the postal service
showing what happens to the mail which is picked
up, taken to the post office, sorted, canceled, sent to
where it is going, and so on. But most of the time,
what is on the screen seems to be there only to catch
hold the child’s attention, to sweeten the learning
pill. A child listening to the program but unable to
see it would get 90 percent of what he was supposed
to learn. The screen is almost never used, as it might
be, convey ideas, information, relationships that
cannot be conveyed with words—ideas that would
be of far greater subtlety, complexity, and
power. Caleb Gattegno, in Towards a Visual Culture,
has suggested what some of these might be, and
many of the ones I propose here draw on his thought.
From the point of view of education, learning, instruction, much of what is done on Sesame Street and in the Sesame Street Learning Kit* seems to me
to be clumsy, misleading, and just plain wrong, typical
of the worst things done in schools. This is a great
pity. Sesame Street , for example, puts great stress on
the alphabet and on learning to count to ten, or more
recently, twenty.

What we must do in helping anyone learn to read
is to make very clear that writing is an extension of
speech, that behind every written word there is a
human voice speaking, and that reading is the way
to hear what those voices are saying. Like the
schools, Sesame Street far too often blurs and hides
these truths. That is all the more unfortunate, because TV can make the point more clearly and vividly than a teacher in a classroom. Suppose that
children were to hear a voice speaking and at the same
time see the words, as they are spoken, appearing in
print. Cartoon figures and the Muppets could have
word balloons over their heads, as in comic strips, a
convention which many children already know; even
when live figures are speaking, the TV screen could
be split, with the words appearing at the side—a
TelePrompTer in reverse.

From a recent program comes an example of
something done extremely badly that might have been done well. Big Bird was standing by a wall on
which he had put the letters OVEL. An adult came
up, and Big Bird began to rhapsodize about the
word he had put up, which he meant to be “love."
The adult told him that he did not have the word
"love” on the wall, and as they discussed this, said
that Big Bird’s OVEL “did not spell anything.” This
statement could not be more false, or misleading, or
damaging. The letters OVEL do spell something.
They spell a word that anyone who can read can
pronounce. The word doesn’t happen to mean anything, but that is something else. Surely we have got
past the Dick and Jane idea that you aren’t reading
a word unless you know its meaning. But then followed something worse. The adult began to say, in
that typical teacher condescending, explaining, how-
could-you-be-so-stupid voice, “But Big Bird, you’ve
put the L after the word, and you should have put it
before it.” She said this several times, as if it were
self-evident that “before” meant “on the left side"
and “after” meant “on the right side,” and as if all
she needed to do to make this clear was to say it
often enough. In fact, there is nothing self-evident or
natural or reasonable about it at all. We just do it
that way. But nothing makes school more mysterious, meaningless, baffling, and terrifying to a
child than tonstantly hearing adults tell him things
as if they were simple, self-evident, natural, and logical, when in fact they are quite the reverse—arbitrary, contradictory, obscure, and often absurd, flying directly in the face of a child’s common sense.

What might have been done instead? Here is
one scenario. The adult reads OVEL
aloud, “oh-vell, oh-vell.” He says, “What
does that mean, Big Bird?” Big Bird says the word
says “love.” The adult insists it says “oh-vell.” As
other people come up, Big Bird appeals to each of
them. They all read “oh-vell,” From this we see
what is very important, that one of the advantages
of written speech is that it says the same thing to
everyone who can read it. (This vital point was
made very clear on the Misterogers’ show immediately following this one, in which a printed sign—GET THE PET TO THE VET—was shown to a number
of people, all of whom read it aloud the same
way.)

Anyway, after a number of people, adults and
children, have told Big Bird that his word says “ohveil,” he says sadly that he wanted it to say “love."
Then someone, preferably a child, says to him, “If
you want it to say ‘love,’ all you have to do is put this
L here.” No nonsense about “before” and “after.” Just
move the letter. Then perhaps the child might say the
word “love” slowly, moving his fingers under the letters matching the sounds. Big Bird might then say,
“Oh, I see, the letters go that way.” Note that even Big
Bird’s mistake, unlike most of the mistakes of children, was nonsensical. There would have been some
reason to put EVOL on the wall, but not OVEL.

What is vital here, and in all reading, is the connection between the order in time of the sounds
of the spoken word and the order in space of the letters
of the written one. If so many children have trouble
discovering this connection, it is because in most
reading instruction we do so much to hide
it—and this is no less true of the methods that, like Sesame
Street, make a big thing out of “what letter does the
word begin with?"

On a program presented one day by the letter X,
another opportunity was lost. An animated-cartoon
narrator was trying to think of words that ended with
X. First a fox went by, and the voice said “fox"—but
the letters FOX did not appear on the screen.
Then other words—box, ox, ax, with appropriate and
clever pictures to match, but still no letters. Instead,
we might have shown what Gattegno calls “transformations,” the way the sound of a word changes when
we change a letter in it—and it is making such transformations, not sounding out a word letter by letter,
that good readers do when they meet words they don’t
know. Thus, beginning with FOX, we might have
moved away the F and brought in a B to make BOX,
then removed the B to leave OX, then changed that
to AX, and from there to TAX. We might then have
brought in an O to make TOX. Here the cartoon
narrator could have looked puzzled. “Tox? Tox?” he
might have said. “I don’t think there is any
such word as TOX. It’s a nonsense word. Some words you
can say and write don’t mean anything.” Perhaps,
then, a few more nonsense words. Perhaps a bit of
business of looking up a word in a dictionary to see
whether it has a meaning. Then perhaps back to
FOX and from there to FIX.

As opposed to “capital letters,” and in place of the
exact words “lower case,” the show follows school
in talking about “small” letters. This is nonsense.
Whether a letter is a capital or not has nothing to do
with size, but with shape. Indeed, the point should be
made that a letter, capital or lower case, can be as
small or large as we care to make it. We might show
writing on the head of a pin, big letters on a blackboard, children writing letters in the snow, skywriting.

A capital A is shown. A voice says that it is like
an upside-down V with a line across. So far, so
good. But why not show all the ways in which we
can deform or change an A without losing its A-ness—make it taller, shorter, thicker, or more slender
in the strokes, slanting left or right, and so on.
Why not, with film clips, show children many different shapes of A’s in real life? Why spread the false
and absurd notion that there is only one way to
make an A? Why not show children making many
different shapes of A’s?

The kindly grocer puts on the counter three
groups of three objects each and one group of four
objects. Then he asks, “Which group doesn’t belong
here?” He sings a little song while the baffled
anxious children look dumbly at the problem. Naturally they are confused. The group of four objects “belongs” on the counter just as much as the others. This
is standard school business: ask an easy question, and
then make it harder by putting it in ambiguous language, so that the point of school becomes figuring
out what the teachers really want.